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Sunday, 25 September 2016

Jeremy Corbyn re-voted Labour Party leader by a landslide

Jeremy
Corbyn re-elected UK Labour leader

Jeremy
Corbyn has been re-elected as leader of the UK's Labour Party,
comfortably defeating his challenger Owen Smith.

He
won 61.8 percent of the vote, a larger margin of victory than last
year.

Mr
Corbyn was re-elected in a leadership contest that was triggered by a
motion of no confidence. Photo: AFP

Mr
Corbyn vowed to bring Labour back together, saying, "We have
much more in common than divides us", and insisting the party
could win the next election as the "engine of progress" in
the country.

More
than half a million party members, trade unionists and registered
supporters voted in the contest.

In
a result announced on the eve of Labour's party conference in
Liverpool, Mr Corbyn won 313,209 votes, compared with Mr Smith's
193,229.

Mr
Corbyn said the debate about who led the party was "now over"
and Labour needed to take its message on the economy, education and
the NHS to the country.

Asked
what steps he would take to reassure critical MPs, he said the return
of shadow cabinet elections was "absolutely in the mix",
although he declined to rule out the possible deselection of sitting
MPs in the run-up to the next election.

"I
think you will see a lot of changes over the next few weeks," he
said.

"They
[MPs] have no need to worry at all because it is all about democracy.
We are all democratically accountable to our party and to our
constituents. They have no need to worry at all. I am reaching out."

Victory
will be sweet - not just because it is a confirmation of his
remarkable support among thousands upon thousands of members around
the country.

It
is Mr Corbyn's second defeat of the Labour establishment, who many of
his supporters believe have tried to undermine the leader
consistently over the last 12 months.

They
talk of a "surge in the purge" as the leadership contest
progressed - party officials vetting and checking new supporters who
had registered to vote.

There
are claims that Labour headquarters deliberately threw Corbyn
supporters off the voting lists to reduce the size of his victory.

Corbyn
supporters believe many MPs have done nothing in the past year other
than try to damage his leadership and today they will be shown to
have failed badly in their attempt to oust him.

In
his acceptance speech, Mr Corbyn said he was "honoured" to
have been elected in a contest that followed months of tension with
many Labour MPs and urged people to "respect the democratic
choice that has been made".

Addressing
supporters, Mr Corbyn said he and his opponents were part of the
"same Labour family" and everyone needed to focus their
energy "on exposing and defeating the Tories".

"We
have much more in common than divides us," he said.

"Let
us wipe that slate clean from today and get on with the work that we
have to do as a party."

Owen
Smith, who had previously ruled out returning to the front bench,
said he respected the result and the onus was on Mr Corbyn to "heal
divisions and unite our movement".

"Jeremy
has won the contest," he said. "He now has to win the
country and he will have my support in trying to do so."

Despite
winning the leadership in a vote of the wider membership and
registered supporters last year, Mr Corbyn, who spent three decades
as part of a marginalised leftwing group of Labour MPs in Parliament,
has never had the support of more than about 20 percent of Labour's
MPs.

And
the contest came about after more than 170 MPs supported a motion of
no confidence in their leader - that confidence vote came after
dozens quit his shadow cabinet and other frontbench roles.

The
Conservatives said Mr Corbyn's re-election would not end the "bitter
power struggle" within the opposition.

"172
Labour MPs don't think Jeremy Corbyn can lead the Labour Party - so
how can he lead the country?" Conservative Party chair Patrick
McLoughlin said.

-BBC

THE
NUMBERS LABOUR DID NOT WANT YOU TO SEE ON TV THIS MORNING – AND WHY

This
morning I had the privilege to be at the special conference for the
announcement of the result of the leadership contest between Jeremy
Corbyn and Owen Smith.

As
you will know by now, the result was emphatic, with Corbyn gaining a
decisive 61.8% share (313,209/506,438/654,006) of the votes in spite
of the efforts
to weed outaround
250,000 mostly Corbyn supporters by suspensions, expulsions and
simply not sending them a ballot.

But
there was a significant little passage of events that you will have
missed. I was seated directly behind deputy leader Tom Watson and
party General Secretary Iain McNicol, within easy touching distance
(if I had wished:

As
he prepared to read the results, NEC Chair Paddy Lillis said he would
read out the overall result but would also show the results by voting
constituency (full members, supporters and affiliate).

After
reading out the overall result, there was a look – missed by the
cameras as they cut to Corbyn and the crowd – between McNicol and
Lillis, the latter then referring to the split of votes among
constituencies being on the screen but not reading them out as was
done at last year’s announcement. Those results were therefore on a
screen for those present to see, but not shown to those watching via
the cameras of BBC News etc.

When
you see what those figures showed, it’s not hard to understand why
McNicol and co wouldn’t want them broadcast to millions of people.
Here are the broken-down results:

There
are two major reasons
why the party machinery doesn’t want those figures on show.

Firstly,
they show that Corbyn won a clear majority in every category,
whereas last year the only one in which he (just) failed to win was
that of full members, where he polled 49.5%.

Today’s
result shows that – in spite of constant character assassination by
both ‘coup’ MPs and the media and the disenfranchisement of
massive numbers of members, Corbyn’s support among full members has
increased by no fewer than 8.5 points.

Which
leads us onto the second reason – the numbers show the truly
staggering extent of the systematic efforts to deny votes to those
who were considered likely to support Corbyn. But that is something
that definitely needs the light of scrutiny, so here’s another
graphic to make it crystal clear:

This
shows that my ‘conservative calculation’ earlier this week of
121,000 denied a ballot was indeed overly conservative.

Even
excluding from the member count the 128,000 denied a vote because of
the arbitrary imposition by the NEC of a 12/1/16 cut-off, the members
who could have voted and didn’t are almost 138,000.

The
registered supporters count is also higher than the 57,000 I
estimated.

Given
that registered supporters had to pay £25 to register, we can safely
assume that all of
those would have voted given the chance. Not absolutely every member
would necessarily have voted if they could, but in such a contentious
contest, the percentage would have been very high.

But
let’s be cautious and say only 80% would have and couldn’t,
because of suspensions or because they simply didn’t receive their
ballot (a situation we already knew was high).

That
means over 172,000 would-be voters were unable to participate in the
election – of which the vast majority
would incontestably have voted for Corbyn – almost as many as Smith
was able to win in total and far more than his share if the 128,000
12/1/16 voters had not been excluded.

The
scale of the gerrymandering by Labour party officials to try to
undermine their own leader is simply huge. But not as huge as the
fact that in spite of it, Corbyn was still able to increase his
majority and achieve a clear win in all sections
of the vote – and he deserveves massive kudos and congratulations
for that.